Sir, - Gerald E. Smyth (June 1st) says I ought to produce convincing evidence of low standards of writing and sub-editing in The Irish Times. I therefore offer a few examples.
1. A recent classified job advertisement specified "good grammer [sic] and spelling essential".
2. Headline to a large recruitment advertisement: "Accept nothing less than the best. We don't." Although the company in question probably supplied the ad in camera-ready form, it might have been warned that it was making an unusually frank admission of low standards. Another case where the opposite of the intended meaning might have been rectified appeared in a recent letter: "Our Taoiseach and other politicians have not denied that this does not extend to the killers of gardai".
3. The letter of mine that started this correspondence first appeared in mangled form, combined with a letter from a different correspondent on a different subject.
4. According to your books pages, some booksellers have been offering markdowns of up to 1,000 per cent - remarkably good value, as a customer would be paid £90 to take away a £10 book.
5. "Isn't it time we grew up" (headline on front of Education Supplement): isn't it time we used question marks with questions?
6. Two sports writers on the same page recently used "fortuitous" to mean "fortunate" (it means "happening by chance"). Another wrote of the Munster team "getting their gander up" - presumably he meant "dander", and not the counterpart of the French cockerel. A recent heading, "Britannia waives the rules", referred not to Britain but only to the English Rugby Union. And it's quite a feat to fit five prevarications into one sentence: "A win isn't exactly imperative but, put simplistically, more than any other game it could go some way to establishing whether this will be a good tour or a bad tour."
7. Spectacularly ungrammatical sentences: "Whispering away at pace, dropping one liners with ease, it is often difficult to hear what he is saying" (it would be wouldn't it?). "As equidistant from Bananarama as they are from Huggy Bear, there is a playful knowingness about them, as if everything they do and say should be put between a giant pair of exclamation marks." The two main problems with this sentence (which refers to the Spice Girls), I feel, are that the writer doesn't know what "equidistant" means, and he's lazily copying cliches from lazy writers in the lifestyle pages of British publications.
8. Imitation is also apparent in your "Profile" features ("Most likely to say", etc.), which are a pale shadow of The Guardian's "Pass Notes". - Yours, etc., Brendan O'Brien,
Ballinteer,
Dublin 16.